Articles

Emoji have become a prominent part of interactive digital communication. Here, we ask the questions: does a grammatical system govern the way people use emoji; and how do emoji interact with the grammar of wri...

Road crashes are a leading cause of death worldwide. In many countries, it is common to see spontaneous roadside memorials constructed in response to road fatalities. These memorials are controversial and are ...

Visualizing data through graphs can be an effective way to communicate one’s results. A ubiquitous graph and common technique to communicate behavioral data is the bar graph. The bar graph was first invented i...

Criminal associates such as terrorist members are likely to deny knowing members of their network when questioned by police. Eye tracking research suggests that lies about familiar faces can be detected by dis...

True and false intentions (i.e., lies and truths about one’s future actions) is a relatively new research topic, despite the high societal value of being able to predict future criminal behavior (e.g., in the ...

In recent years, fraudsters have begun to use readily accessible digital manipulation techniques in order to carry out face morphing attacks. By submitting a morph image (a 50/50 average of two people’s faces)...

The role of image colour in face identification has received little attention in research despite the importance of identifying people from photographs in identity documents (IDs). Here, in two experiments, we...

In general, people are poor at detecting deception. Older adults are even worse than young adults at detecting deceit, which might make them uniquely vulnerable to certain types of financial fraud. One reason ...

Intentional forgetting refers to the attempt to marshal top-down control to purposefully forget, and has been demonstrated in the laboratory using directed forgetting paradigms. Here, we asked whether the mech...

In two studies we investigated whether removing opportunities to calculate could improve students’ subsequent ability to solve similar word problems. Students were first asked to write explanations for three w...

A growing body of research is beginning to understand how people comprehend sequential visual narratives. However, previous work has used materials that primarily rely on visual information (i.e., they contain...

Interpretation of volumetric medical images represents a rapidly growing proportion of the workload in radiology. However, relatively little is known about the strategies that best guide search behavior when l...

New automobiles provide a variety of features that allow motorists to perform a plethora of secondary tasks unrelated to the primary task of driving. Despite their ubiquity, surprisingly little is known about ...

Researchers have argued that simultaneous lineups should follow the principle of propitious heterogeneity, based on the idea that if the fillers are too similar to the perpetrator even an eyewitness with a goo...

While the coordination of oculomotor and manual behavior is essential for driving a car, surprisingly little is known about this interaction, especially in situations requiring a quick steering reaction. In th...

Research examining the relation between spatial skills and the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields has focused on small-scale spatial skills, even though some STEM disciplines—partic...

A significant problem in eyewitness identification occurs when witnesses view a suspect in one venue such as a mugshot and then later in a lineup where the suspect is the only previously viewed person. Prior r...

Overconfidence in one’s driving ability can lead to risky decision-making and may therefore increase the accident risk. When educating people about the risks of their driving behavior, it is all too easy for i...

To successfully interact with software agents, people must call upon basic concepts about goals and intentionality and strategically deploy these concepts in a range of circumstances where specific entailments...

Inattentional blindness methods allow for an unobtrusive measure of the spatial distribution of attention; because subjects do not expect the critical object, they have no reason to devote attention to task-ir...

The comparison of fingerprints by expert latent print examiners generally involves repeating a process in which the examiner selects a small area of distinctive features in one print (a target group), and sear...

While the Concealed Information Test (CIT) can determine whether examinees recognize critical details, it does not clarify the origin of the memory. Hence, when unknowledgeable suspects are contaminated with c...

What can theories regarding memory-related gaze preference contribute to the field of deception detection? While abundant research has examined the ability to detect concealed information through physiological...

Why do people change their strategies for solving problems? In this research, we tested whether negative feedback and the context in which learners encounter a strategy influence their likelihood of adopting t...

Home loans are the largest financial transaction consumers typically enter and the consequences from entering overpriced or unaffordable home loans can devastate individuals and entire communities. This articl...

Navigation systems are ubiquitous tools to assist wayfinders of the mobile information society with various navigational tasks. Whenever such systems assist with self-localization and path planning, they reduc...

In five experiments, we examined the conditions under which participants remembered true and false information given as feedback. Participants answered general information questions, expressed their confidence...

The comprehension of dynamic naturalistic events poses at least two challenges to the cognitive system: filtering relevant information with attention and dealing with information that was missing or missed. Wi...

Illusory causation refers to a consistent error in human learning in which the learner develops a false belief that two unrelated events are causally associated. Laboratory studies usually demonstrate illusory...

Previous research has demonstrated reliable fluctuations in attentional processes during the course of the day. Everyday life experience sampling, during which participants respond to “probes” delivered at ran...

The ability to predict what is going to happen in the near future is integral for daily functioning. Previous research suggests that predictability varies over time, with increases in prediction error at those...

Explanations from neuroscience are threatening to replace those from psychology in the eyes and hands of journalists, university administrators, granting agencies, and research students. If replacement happens...

Although phenomena such as change blindness and inattentional blindness are robust, it is not entirely clear how these failures of visual awareness are related to failures to attend to visual information, to r...

Spatial reasoning skill has consistently been found to be malleable. However, there is little research to date on embedding spatial training within learning frameworks. This study evaluated the effects of a cl...

The visual environment contains predictable information - “statistical regularities” - that can be used to aid perception and attentional allocation. Here we investigate the role of statistical learning in fac...

Video job interviews have become a common hiring practice, allowing employers to save money and recruit from a wider applicant pool. But differences in job candidates’ internet connections mean that some inter...

Attention in the “real world” fluctuates over time, but these fluctuations are hard to examine using a timed trial-based experimental paradigm. Here we use film to study attention. To achieve short-term engage...

Previous work has found that people are drawn to explanations of psychological phenomena when these explanations contain neuroscience information, even when that information is irrelevant. This preference may ...

The present study examined the impact that the environment has on the ability to remain attentive and retain information. Participants listened to an audiobook in either a controlled lab setting or in an uncon...

Genetic and other biological explanations appear to have mixed blessings for the stigma of mental disorder. Meta-analytic evidence shows that these “biogenetic” explanations reduce the blame attached to suffer...

Police departments often use verbal confidence measures (highly confident, somewhat confident) with a small number of values, whereas psychologists measuring the confidence–accuracy relationship typically use ...

Users of mobile touch devices are often confronted with a great number of apps, challenging an efficient access to single applications. Especially when looking for infrequently used apps, users have to perform...

Many medical professions require practitioners to perform visual categorizations in domains such as radiology, dermatology, and neurology. However, acquiring visual expertise is tedious and time-consuming and ...

Searching for unfamiliar faces in crowds is an important task in modern society. In surveillance and security settings, it is sometimes critical to locate a target individual quickly and accurately. In this st...